The Fall Must Have Occurred A Very
Long Time Back, As The Vegetation That Overspreads The Rude
Slope - Hawthorn, Furze, And Ivy - Has An Ancient Look.
Here
are huge masses of rock standing isolated, that resemble in
their forms ruined castles, towers, and churches, some of them
completely overgrown with ivy.
On this rough slope, under the
shelter of the cliff, with the sea at its feet, the villagers
have formed their cultivated patches. The patches, wildly
irregular in form, some on such steeply sloping ground as to
suggest the idea that they must have been cultivated on all
fours, are divided from each other by ridges and by masses of
rock, deep fissures in the earth, strips of bramble and thorn
and furze bushes. Altogether the effect was very singular
the huge rough mass of jumbled rock and soil, the ruin wrought
by Nature in one of her Cromwellian moods, and, scattered
irregularly about its surface, the plots or patches of
cultivated smoothness - potato rows, green parallel lines
ruled on a grey ground, and big, blue-green, equidistant
cabbage-globes - each plot with its fringe of spike-like onion
leaves, crinkled parsley, and other garden herbs. Here the
villagers came by a narrow, steep, and difficult path they had
made, to dig in their plots; while, overhead, the gulls,
careless of their presence, pass and repass wholly occupied
with their own affairs.
I spent hours of rare happiness at this spot in watching the
birds. I could not have seen and heard them to such advantage
if their breeding-place had been shared with other species.
Here the herring-gulls had the rock to themselves, and looked
their best in their foam-white and pearl-grey plumage and
yellow legs and beaks.
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